[BTW: There are a LOT of gems to be found on this site.]
25 comments
Confidence != Induction != Religious faith
I also hope that Richard Dawkins will be transformed [in]to our modern day Paul. Which means he will sabotage your religion from within.
Perhaps with his sabotage, he could undo the original sabotage perpetrated by Saul.
Just a vagrant happy fantasy....
Debates between theists and atheists are silly. No one has ever proved there is a god, and no one has ever proved there isn't, despite thousands of years of trying. Father Copleston and Bertrand Russell (an agnostic, actually) couldn't do it. Dawkins and Lennox can't do it either. Lennox appears to use various versions of the so-called "moral argument", a horse that Cardinal Newman beat even further to death after Kant finished with it. Dawkins basically says god is unnecessary, which is hardly a proof that god is non-existent.
Confidence in something is not faith in something. You have faith in that which is previously untested/unknown. You have confidence in something that has a history of success (or failure if it's confidence that it will fail, like fundies arguments).
You have faith in gods, because they have not (yet) given any proof that they can be relied upon. You have confidence in your chair to hold you up, because it has done so many times in the past. If you have to cling to faith for your chair to hold you up... then you need to loose some weight.
One can't turn all what he or she beliefs into reason, it's true, but at least, they should make sure that what they're defending is reasonable and defendable with logic. Something that Ricard Dawkins tries, but you don't.
No, the Earth didn't come from the Big Bang, at least not directly. The Earth resulted from left over gases and meteorites from when the sun formed, that clumped together and created a gravity well that kept sucking in more debris until the Earth was a cooling ball of molten iron.
szena wrote: "I have faith that the chair I bend to sit in will still be there when my butt gets down there. Do you consider that a religion too?"
Depends, in the case of some people I've seen, I'm pretty sure that the chair holding their butt up does actually count as a miracle!
If someone defines "faith" as any use of inductive reasoning, there's no further discussion.
Refusal to accept all inductive reasoning is called "extreme skepticism" (ES). As szena pointed out, with ES, we have no basis for assuming the chair we're about to sit on will continue to exist as we sit. No one, even Hume, really believes in ES except as a sophistic debating trick. So there's no point in arguing with someone who pretends to support ES. Fundies adopt ES only with regard to stuff they disagree with. They certainly don't apply it to their religious beliefs.
"Faith" is the belief in something that is not falsifiable ; that is, not just something that hasn't been falsified, but something that could never be falsified by any rationally conceivable additional information. Evolution, for example, is falsifiable. Any number of facts, if actually observed, could disprove evolution. All one would need is a single undisturbed rock layer with humans and ostracoderms in it. Or a DNA sequence for humans that was closer to a reptile than a primate. Or an animal that is completely genetically unrelated to any other.
God isn't falsifiable. Philosopher Antony Flew's "gardener" parable (actually John Wisdom's) shows why. Belief in God requires faith. Belief in evolution or the Big Bang doesn't. It just involves inductive reasoning.
Gee let's see faith in YOURSELF to get across your ideas is the same as faith in the existence of an invisible, omnipotent creator of the universe and controller of the fate of every living thing. Yeah, right... You want to come at me with that comparison again champ.
"Debates between theists and atheists are silly. No one has ever proved there is a god, and no one has ever proved there isn't"
-John
1. The probability of God's existence can be debated.
lemme guess:
"Time and again, Creationists try to corner me by saying the world could not have come from a 'big bang.' They are right. The Big Bang did not create the world, it created the entire universe. The world was formed many billions of years later through a slow accretion of gas and dust from a collapsing interstellar cloud."
How the Fundies interpret that:
"OMG Dawkins said the world didn't come from a 'big bang'! He's converting to Christianity!"
@ tracer: they did the same thing with Einstein, when he said he 'believed in the god of Spinoza' without ever finding out what that god was, they assumed he believed in their god, not realizing that Spinoza was the father of modern pantheism.
Creationist stress the faith people have in science only to try and compare it to religion, to fog the issue and make some think science and religion carry the same weight.
Faith in religion is blind faith, needing no evidence and denying the importance of evidence.
Science is faith in predictable testable experiments, observation or proven mathematical formulas.
What can't be proven to this day (Big Bang) can still be trusted to have followed scientific principles, Hawking and other physicists problem isn't that the Big Bang doesn't fit but that the singularity can't be defined as all our laws of physics are violated by such a confined mass, way before it becomes the singularity.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
To post a comment, you'll need to Sign in or Register . Making an account also allows you to claim credit for submitting quotes, and to vote on quotes and comments. You don't even need to give us your email address.
